Monday, March 14, 2011

10 Homes that Defy Gravity - 1o ngôi nhà coi thường trọng lực

Wozoco Apartments (Amsterdam-Osdorp, Netherlands) A zoning law and blueprint flub were the inspiration for this apartment complex. Dutch housing regulations require apartment construction to provide a certain amount of daylight to their tenants–but MVRDV architects forgot to plan for that. Their solution? To hang thirteen of the 100 units off the north facade of the block. The ingenious design saves ground floor space and allows enough sunlight to enter the east or west facade.

Floating Castle (Ukraine)

Supported by a single cantilever --and quite discussed at Panoramio, this mysterious levitating farm house belongs in a sci-fi flick. It’s claimed to be an old bunker for the overload of mineral fertilizers but we’re sure there’s a better back story... alien architects probably had a hand in it.

Habitat 67 (Montreal, Canada)

Apartments connect and stack like Lego blocks in Montreal's Habitat 67. Without a traditional vertical construction, the apartments have the open space that most urban residences lack, including a separate patio for each apartment.

Free Spirit Spheres (British Columbia, Canada)

Free Spirit Spheres can be hung from the trees as shown, making a tree house. They can also be hung from any other solid objects or placed in cradles on the ground. There are four attachment points on the top of each sphere and another four anchor points on the bottom. Each of the attachment points is strong enough to carry the weight of the entire sphere and contents.

The spheres are made of two laminations of wood strips over laminated wood frames. The outside surface is then finished and covered with a clear fibreglass. The result is a beautiful and very tough skin. The skin is waterproof and strong enough to take the impacts that come with life in a dynamic environment such as the forest.

Cube House (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

Living in a tilted house is much easier than it looks—just ask the people living in these the Kijk-Kubus homes. Architect Piet Blom tipped a conventional house forty-five degrees and rested it upon a hexagon-shaped pole so that three sides face down and the other three face the sky. Each of the cube houses accommodates three floors: a living space including a kitchen, study and bathroom, the middle floor houses bedrooms and the top is the pyramid room that can act like an attic or viewing deck. These houses are quite expensive, but you can satisfy your curiosity by visiting the museum show house.

Gangster's House (Archangelsk, Russia)

One-time Russian gangster Nikolai Sutyagin’s home is certainly unusual. The eccentric former convict’s seemingly accidental 15-year project begun in 1992 stands 13 floors, 144 feet high. He claims he was only intending to build a two-story house - larger than those of his neighbours to reflect his position as the city’s richest man.

Mushroom House (Cincinnati, Ohio)

So disparate in materials and shapes this hodgepodge house looks like its been welded and glued together. But this is no hobo-construction, it was designed by the professor of architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati, Terry Brown, and was recently on the market for an estimated $400K.

Upside-Down House (Syzmbark, Poland)

This upside down design seems totally nonsensical–but that is exactly the message the Polish philanthropist and designer, Daniel Czapiewski, was trying to send. The unstable and backward construction was built as a social commentary on Poland’s former Communist era. The monument is worth a trip be it for a lesson in history or balance.

Pod House (Rochester, New York)

We assumed this oddball home was UFO-inspired, but it turns out the weed Queen Anne’s lace is where it got it's roots. Its thin stems support pods with interconnecting walkways.

Heliotrope Rotating House (Freiburg, Germany)

Green to the extreme, Architect Rolf Disch built a solar powered home that rotates towards the warm sun in the winter and rotates back toward its well-insulated rear in the summer. A house that spins in circles doesn’t sound too stable to us, but for the environment it is worth the risk.

Graffiti Brawl: Kenny Scharf Fights Back After His Houston Street Mural Is Defaced

by Judd Tully

KennyScharfcự nựsau khitranh tường HoustonStreetcủa ônglàbị xóa sửa

NEW YORK— Under cover of New York's holiday season blizzard, a crew of graffiti writers carried out a rude sneak attack on a godfather of their own scene when they bombed a spray-painted outdoor mural by Kenny Scharf — a street artist street artist who had prowled the East Village in the 1980s — on the busy corner of East Houston and the Bowery.

The aggressive fill-ins — slang for when a graffiti writer sprays a layer of paint on top of an existing work and then executes a new design there — occurred at a site that has been a piece of downtown art history ever since the late Keith Haring created an unauthorized mural there in 1982. The following year, a group of artists from the then-happening Fun Gallery that included Haring, LA2, Crane, ON2, and Scharf returned to wall and covered it in a brazen mix of cartoon-like characters and tags. (A friend of both Haring and Basquiat from his days at the School of Visual Art in the 1970s, Scharf fell into the graffiti underground largely through his association with them.)

Since the summer of 2008, the wall's owner, Tony Goldman of Goldman Properties, a major New York downtown real-estate owner, partnered with Deitch Projects and later with Kathy Grayson's Hole Gallery in SoHo to invite such artists as the Brazilian twin-brother team Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey, and Barry McGee to paint temporary murals there. Brought to life in early December and remaining in situ till March, Scharf's five-day effort — arranged in collaboration with Paul Kasmin Gallery — consumed 200 cans of donated spray paint to render intersecting, color-charged clownish figures in psychedelic hues, all rendered in the artist's familiar free-hand, horror vaccui style. Apparently, it proved irresistible as a target.

"It's painful," said Scharf of the attack, speaking by phone from the Los Angeles studio where he is preparing for his two-venue "Naturafutura and Three Dozen!" exhibitions at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea on the 27th. "Although I can't say I'm super surprised. I mean, when you put yourself out there on a wall like that, that sometimes happens. But it doesn't make me like it."

The taggers "don't know about art or care about art," he said. "They're not creating art, they're just tagging." That distinction is something that Scharf, clearly angered by the incident, wanted to underscore. "I'm not just somebody who came of the blue," he said. "My stuff doesn't look like graffiti, even though it's done with spray paint and it uses a lot of the language of graffiti. I'm not out there just making tags, or trying to pretend I'm somebody that I'm not."

The artist's fury also boiled over onto the Web site ANIMAL New York, where he laid into the comments section on a post about the fill-ins, entering a blogging battle with his defacers and street-art pundits who were both for and against their actions. "When you dis someone you should have a really good reason and hopefully improve what was there before," Scharf wrote there. "It's an act of violence and aggression."

"We had fun rocking throw-ups over your mural," replied one tagger under the name PETERPANPOSSE, using another term for painting over a graffiti work. "It was a night I will speak of for years to come blizzard of 2K10. Me and my boys were out tearing shit up getting fuckin wasted! Nothing lasts forever Holmes….”

Someone using the name Ben agreed: "Psychopathic street bombers don't care about somebody's mural. They wanted the spot and took it. That's it…. Serves that Kenny guy right through for arrogantly thinking he couldn’t get dissed."

Kathy Grayson, who runs the Hole Gallery with her partner Meghan Coleman (both former directors of the now-shuttered Deitch Projects), described the guerrilla action as "a crime of opportunity," explaining that "the blizzard was the only reason it happened. That's the best night to write graffiti because the police cars can't follow you and you just disappear. It's a field day for graffiti writers."

Others defended Scharf, taking the bombers to task. "You can't call what those guys did fun," wrote Sandlot. "There's nothing fun about it. If you knew anything about Kenny. He did his own share of graffiti more than a few decades ago and the point is not that it's illegal. That's stupid. It's art and it's positive and pure fun."

In the wake of the incident, a friend of Scharf's — who chose to remain anonymous, not wanting to get dragged into the ruckus — temporarily repaired the wall, with Scharf's blessing. "It doesn't really look like I did it," the artist says of the repair, "but I'm very happy its there."

Women Mud Wrestling - Phụ bữ bôi bùn đấu vật

The charming women folks and their makeup kits seem to have taken a back seat nowadays. Looks like that their preferences have changed and they have moved towards muddy and dirty wrestling sports. Statutory Warning: Be sure to stay away from these nasty chicks! They can be your worst nightmare to deal with. The funny athleticism and whole body transformation are something unique that comes to this sport. If you are wondering as to what the taste of that real mud fight would be like then you should be out there and competing with these women.

PARIS (AP) - Like an enterprising Andy Warhol of the 16th century, German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach produced multiple paintings of the same subject, churning out strikingly similar versions of his trademark soft-edged nudes and angel-faced Madonnas.

A new exhibition at Paris' Musee du Luxembourg aims to restore Cranach's image by highlighting his unique, velvety style and showing how the artist - the official painter for the Saxon court of Wittenberg and a friend of reformer Martin Luther - reacted to the tumult of his epoch.

Opening on Wednesday, "Cranach and his Times" includes 50 paintings and engravings of his perennial subjects, Adam and curvaceous Eve at the apple tree, Madonnas with chubby Christ child and even chubbier cherubs, reclining nymphs swathed in the sheerest of silks. With their rounded forms and soft, slightly fuzzy lines, Cranach's nudes exude the painter's signature mixture of chastity and carnal sensuousness.

"When you look at the paintings, you as a spectator are attracted to the beauty of the nudes ... but at the same time, you're being pushed away," the show's curator, Guido Messling, told The Associated Press in an interview. "This ambiguity plays an important role in Cranach's work."

The exhibition includes two of Cranach's best-known nudes, "Allegory of Justice," a 1537 work that features a bow-lipped blond brandishing a sword in one hand and a balance in the other, and "The Nymph of the Spring," on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., showing a young woman lounging in a verdant clearing beneath the admonition, in capital letters, "Do not disturb the rest of the nymph of the sacred spring: I am sleeping."

Other top work in the show include a self-portrait from 1531 of the dark-haired artist from Kronach in Bavaria, his white-flecked beard and melancholic amber eyes contrasting with the somber background, and several portraits of Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer who was among Cranach's friends.

Though he never painted exact reproductions of the same painting, he "was a businessman" who for commercial reasons often expedited several very similar works, Messling said. The Paris show includes a handful of portraits of ancient Rome's legendary Lucretia, as well as allegories of charity and other virtues.

The later paintings bear Cranach's coat of arms - a winged snake - though it's impossible to determine how many of the 1,000 paintings attributed to the him were executed by the master himself and how many were produced, Warhol-style, by his 15 strong workshops, Messling said.

Many of the paintings in the show are displayed alongside similar works by Cranach's contemporaries from Italy and Flanders, as well as the German maestro Durer. While it's clear Cranach heavily borrowed from these works, often mimicking the same composition, he and his atelier still gave their paintings their own signature touch.

"Even people who don't know the name Cranach ... do recognize his art," Messling said. "Cranach's one of the very few artists that really created a style that is still recognizable. You can put him next to Picasso in this regard."

In a sign of the growing appreciation for Cranach, the Louvre Museum recently paid €4 million ($5 million) for his "Three Graces," featuring blond nudes wearing heavy gold chains round their necks, one sporting a red velvet saucer hat, Messling said. One quarter of the funds used for the purchase were raised through an unusual donation campaign that saw individuals and companies make gifts online.